This paper, as well as all the other term papers, is a culmination of the teachings of Kane, Ong, and Yates, our class discussions, other courses I’ve taken, conversations I’ve had, my lifetime of experiences and in fact, everything that has preceded me. When I speak with a friend, that conversation exists in reflection of all of my previous conversations with that friend. Similarly, whenever I use a word, this is in response to having heard the word previously. At some point in my past I learned that word, just as the people who spoke the word to me learned it somewhere previously. It goes back on an on. What we say is part of an endless conversation starting when we first learned to speak, when words began, with thought, with nature, with everything. Speech is like stories, which are “told on top of the ruins of other stories like villages built on the strata of older villages that have crumpled in time,” (Kane 172). To navigate this chaos of everything being connected, we must learn to focus, as we do with our memory theaters. Language is not truly chaotic, but organic. Meaning can be found in change and repetition. Concrete rules do not necessarily limit our understanding, they simply frame it.
In the Neverending Story, the author must pull us back every time the narrative wanders off on a tangent. When we start to follow the adventures of a side character we hear some variant of “but that is another story and will be told another time.” It isn’t just a subplot. Just as in orality, it’s a link to another mythline. Everything is part of everything else. We are all physical continuations of our ancestry, so is language. Over generations, language evolved from gestures, and continues to evolve, despite print culture. “If the essence of life is information carried in DNA, then society and civilization are just colossal memory systems and a metropolis…simply a sprawling external memory,” (Ghost in the Shell 2). The physical creations of mankind are an aspect of our natural lineage. Over generations, concepts that seem to be the result of individual decisions, may in fact be revealing greater trends. It is as Michelangelo believed of his art, the sculptures already existed in the stone, but he needed to remove everything else to reveal their beauty. In Watchmen, Dr. Manhattan asks, “A world grows around me. Am I shaping it, or do its predetermined contours guide my hand?” (Moore IV, 27). Kane addresses this same concern, “In a wolf-deer system who runs the show?” “It seems as if the overall circuit governs their actions. It is as if the overall pattern thinks,” (165). Perhaps understanding fades, like in the telephone game, which is played by whispering a few lines into someone’s ear, having them recite it to the next person, and on down the line. With each exchange the message is corrupted until amusing but unrecognizable. Language is not utterly linear, however, and even when messages are not identical, truth is found in the changes. It’s these random little connections that serve us in the end.
Benedict Anderson’s thoughts on identity are discussed in the film Waking Life. “Well, he's talking about like, say, a baby picture. So you pick up this picture, this two-dimensional image, and you say, "That's me." Well, to connect this baby in this weird little image with yourself living and breathing in the present, you have to make up a story like, "This was me when I was a year old, and then later I had long hair, and then we moved to Riverdale, and now here I am." So it takes a story that's actually a fiction to make you and the baby in the picture identical to create your identity,” (Waking Life).
An understanding emerges through these sequential changes. Film writer and director David Mamet teaches filmmakers to break the story into scenes and each scene into concise little actions. This is montage. Show a man’s face in neutral expression, and then the image of a steaming bowl of soup, the man is hungry. Show the same expressionless man, followed by an old woman in a coffin, the man is sad. Eisenstein tells us, “Each sequential element is perceived not next to the other, but on top of the other,” (“Soviet Montage Theory”). On top as in layers, each understood within the context of that which surrounds it. Deeply moving stories are told through a succession of inert actions. Giulio Camillo uses the metaphor of the vast forest (Yates 143). We can understand it when we look down at the forest from a high slope but we tend to experienced it amidst the trees. We are first-person individuals trying to comprehend the universe omnisciently. We must follow our mythlines and observe, as understanding emerges from the chaos, as certain elements and connections repeat.
Communication itself is repetition. Use a unique word every time you see a horse, no one will understand. Through patterns we infer intent. Repetition invites connections. A musical motif will appear, reiterate, alter form, and vanish. Those moments of recurrence, particularly when we are not conscious of it, are strangely fulfilling. They simultaneously present the new while linking with the old. Repetition is cyclical and acts as an ever-renewing framework. Using “please” and “thank you” is appreciative, but it also smoothes the gears of conversation. Repetition acts as a sign, triggering a person to enter a certain mindset, a certain understanding. Flat characters and clichés are criticized, but they successfully convey the exact same thing every time. They convey perfectly comprehensible ideas. Clichés prepare your expectations, like movie genres. You may know nothing else about a film, but choose to go because it’s a western, or a romantic comedy, or a slasher. You must be willing to take on the proper mindset for the task at hand in order to reach your full potential. Like Raven, you must first push your mind through and pull your body after (Kane 56).
Putting on a certain mindset seems limiting, but it is necessary. Society is full of these intentional limitations. “Joining the army, putting on a uniform... You’re giving up your personal life and accepting a socially determined manner of life in the service of the society of which you are a member,” (Campbell 15). Specialization may limit capacity for adaptation, but as the old adage goes, “jack of all trades, master of none.” As we’ve been taught, we have domesticated words the way we fence in nature. We’ve tamed them. This is perfect word choice for the biological nature of language. “What does that mean-‘tame’?” the little prince asks the fox in Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s book, “It is an act too often neglected…it means to establish ties…But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world,” (Saint Exupery 66). When patterns do not present themselves, we must make them. Our decisions in this way instill value. The trick is to retain the capacity to break the patterns, to be open to adaptation and discovery. There is nothing wrong with remaining in a pattern set by someone else, the key is to understand why that pattern works, to make it your own. Videogames combine film-like storytelling with player-driven choices. In EarthBound, you choose your name and so on and the beginning, but it doesn’t affect skills or statistics in any way. For example, you can choose a favorite food. I chose pasta. Every time I returned to my game home from the difficult journey my game mother would tell me to eat some pasta and go to bed. It became a pattern, not essential to the completion of the game, but essential to the emotional ties the game forms with the player.
This time-wasting repetition of the seemingly meaningless, whether it is a favorite food or color, an epithet, saying please and thank you, or whatever else, gives power. It gives a sense of rejuvenation through repetition, just like the musical motifs. Recurrence is reassuring. We must willingly embrace redundancies. This is why chaos is beneficial. The more variety, the more chances there are that memorable connections will manifest. This is why we are all giving presentations. Some may have only loose ties to our topics, but the random little elements that make those lectures unique may be the key to remembering everything in this course for a single student. Chaos allows us to find usable order. A previous topic of discussion, the Golden Compass, brings another example. Everyone has a daemon that takes on many forms in youth but settles to one with maturity. A single form may lack freedom, but since your daemon is your soul, you gain a new understanding of your identity; your strengths and your weaknesses. Concrete rules are necessary. “Take piano: keys begin, keys end. You know there are eighty-eight of them. Nobody can tell you any different. They are not infinite. You're infinite... And on those keys, the music that you can make... is infinite,” (The Legend of 1900). Brilliance and creativity come from playing off the limitations.
Language and culture are organic. Everything connects and affects everything else. “The story unfolds over the course of its telling, over the course of a lifetime, or several lifetimes, according to the consistency of its various environments-social, natural and supernatural. Validated by this consistency, the myth is a polyphonic composition,” (Kane 147). We, however, are left to follow our own seemingly linear stories within this web. The system must be trusted to evolve on its own, it can’t be forced. However, there are inherent patterns. Following these patterns or making our own rules and frameworks, consciously limiting a portion of ourselves, allows us to progress. The world is not chaos because nothing has meaning; it is chaos because everything connects. Our experiences reveal a specific sequence of these connections and with effort some of the other stories that cross our paths. Only by remembering this, by seeing ourselves as the story characters, can we begin to view the world from above the world, from a third-person perspective.
This paper started as a list of interesting topics and quotes from the class and things that the class brought to mind. I tried to categorize them, tried to reveal some of the countless links. In the end, the subject is still vast, but manageable. I cannot limit it more, because this inability to be limited is what the theme has revealed itself to be. Nothing is truly concrete; it is simply a tight cluster of other things. Within these pages, some kind of connection has been made, and that is the point. Greater meaning will be determined by you, the reader, because, “the storytelling act is dialogical rather than monological. There is give-and-take with the listeners happening all the time with the telling of a story,” (Kane 198). By remembering some of these random little elements you can remember this paper, and subsequently the entirety of this course, and everything discussed within in it, no matter how insignificant.
Works Cited
Campbell, Joseph. The Power of Myth. New York: Anchor Books, 1991.
EarthBound. Dir. Shigesato Itoi. Videogame. Nintendo, 1995.
Ende, Michael. The Neverending Story. New York: Dutton Children's Books, 1997.
Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. Dir. Mamoru Oshii. DVD. Go Fish Pictures/Bandai Entertainment, 2004.
Kane, Sean. Wisdom of the Mythtellers. Peterborough, Ont., Canada: Broadview P, 1998.
The Legend of 1900. Dir. Giuseppe Tornatore. DVD. Fine Line Features, 1999.
Mamet, David. On Directing Film. New York: Penguin, 1992.
Moore, Alan. Watchmen. New York: DC Comics Inc., 1987.
Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Pullman, Philip. The Golden Compass. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc, 1996.
Saint Exupéry, Antoine. The Little Prince. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc., 1943.
"Soviet Montage Theory." Wikipedia. 27 Apr. 2009
Yates, Frances A. The Art of Memory. New York: University Of Chicago P, 2001.
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